Portuguese in Schools

Oct 12, 2009 Editorial

There has been much hullabaloo raised in the wake of the opening of the Takatu Bridge that now links us seamlessly with Brazil. It does not take a rocket scientist (much less a sycophantic government lackey) to appreciate the immense possibilities opened up to us with this development.

A huge country (area – 8,456,510 sq km; population – 191 million) with a comparable economy (GDP – US$ 2 trillion) sitting on our southern borders should have been hard to ignore as far as our developmental efforts were concerned. But we managed to do so until now. We hope that this wilful obduracy has now ceased.

The proposal by President Lula of Brazil to help with the construction of a hydroelectric facility and the surfacing of the Linden/Lethem Highway with an extension to a deep-water harbour in Berbice makes it inevitable that our economy will become much closely integrated with our ebullient neighbour. (It was the last of the major economies to slow down in the ongoing world recession and appears to be the first to be coming out of it.)

The question for us has to be, “What are we going to do about it?” Are we going to passively accept whatever unfolds? We hope not because this will be the surest way to guarantee another type of underdevelopment. We need to take charge – as best as we can – of the coming integration.

For starters, we can do worse than learning to communicate with the Brazilians in their own language – Portuguese. There are some who figure that because English is the universal language of world commerce, we can count on the Brazilians being able to get their message over to us. But that position exposes the problem.

“How do we communicate our message to the Brazilians? Should we always allow the Brazilians to formulate the arguments that will inevitably arise?” We hope not. In any case, there will be countless Brazilians that could help with our industrialisation and mega-farming that may be lost to us because they cannot communicate in English.

In this space, we have consistently been calling upon the administration, through the Ministry of Education, to introduce the teaching of Portuguese into our high school curriculum.

As we have pointed out, we introduced Spanish some years back under the assumption that we were living in a “sea of Spanish speakers”.

The benefits, we were promised, would be massive in the economic sphere. We ignored the gentle giant in the south and focused on the rapacious “wanna be” in the west. One wonders if we were being prepared to assimilate into Spanish-speaking Venezuela, which claims two-thirds of our country. Brazil has never expressed any expansionist tendencies towards us.

In the past few years the teaching of Spanish has intensified, with the introduction of the language to the sixth grade in our primary schools. What gives? Could someone in the Ministry of Education tell us how this expenditure on Spanish has benefitted our nation? Maybe the facilitation of our scholarships to Cuba? Has this been cost effective?

But at least there is some justification (however attenuated) for teaching Spanish. What can one say of French? One of our pet peeves has been the stubborn continuation of the colonial practice of teaching French in our premier secondary schools.

This affectation, of course, arose out of the quaint notion that French was the language of European “civilization” to which we natives should strive to acquire. The time is long past for us to jettison this affliction on our children.

The Ministry of Education is once again urged to reconsider its foreign language curriculum. We believe that the time is long past when we should have introduced Portuguese into our schools.

Rather than Spanish, we should begin with Portuguese in the Primary Schools using an introductory unit that can be quickly imparted to teachers. The training of teachers in Portuguese can most likely be facilitated at the Teachers Training College with the assistance of Brazil. An approach should be made forthwith.

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Portuguese in Schools

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